Maturation
Racking
Moving cider off the sediment it has thrown, which both cleans the liquid and — by taking yeast and nitrogen away with the deposit — slows what is left of the ferment.
Also called Drawing off, Soutirage, Trasiego.
- Stage
- Maturation
- Traditional in
- No single tradition — used wherever it suits
- What it most changes
- Body down, fermentation character down
- Safety
- None recorded
What it is
Racking is the transfer of cider from one vessel into another, leaving the settled deposit behind. The deposit is spent and dying yeast, fruit debris, precipitated pectin and protein, and whatever bacteria have come along; the clear liquid above it is drawn off by siphon, tap or pump without disturbing what has fallen. It is the most routine operation in a traditional cellar and also one of the most consequential, because a racking does not only clarify. It removes a large part of the working yeast population and much of the remaining nutrient, and so changes how the ferment behaves from that point on.
Why it is used
- Cider left indefinitely on a thick deposit of dead yeast picks up autolytic and reductive character, and in the worst case hydrogen sulphide and mercaptans that are far easier to prevent than to remove.
- Taking away yeast cells and the nitrogen bound up in them starves the remaining ferment, which is the traditional means of arriving at a cider that finishes with sugar still in it rather than fermenting flat out to dryness.
- Separating the liquid from its sediment is the first and cheapest step towards clarity, and a cider racked two or three times will often fall bright without any fining or filtration at all.
- Every transfer is an opportunity to smell and taste the batch, to check a vessel for taint, and to consolidate part-full containers before they are left standing.
How it works
- Gravity does the sorting: yeast cells, pectin-protein flocs and fruit solids are denser than the liquid and settle into a layer whose top surface is reasonably sharp once movement has stopped, so the clear fraction can be decanted off it.
- Yeast in a settled deposit eventually autolyses, its cell walls breaking down and releasing amino acids, peptides and — where the cells have been scavenging sulphur-containing amino acids under nitrogen stress — volatile sulphides into the liquid immediately above.
- Because most of the suspended cell population leaves with the deposit, the cell count in the racked cider falls sharply and the rate of sugar consumption falls with it; repeating this at intervals holds the ferment at a crawl.
- A racking that is not done under gas picks up dissolved oxygen at the surface of the receiving vessel, which the surviving yeast largely consumes but which also drives a small amount of phenolic oxidation and acetaldehyde formation.
What it changes
The direction this step pushes the finished drink in, dimension by dimension. A direction, not a measurement: how far it moves depends on the juice, the temperature and how the step is carried out.
| Dimension | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Sweetness | Either way | Removing yeast and nitrogen with the deposit slows sugar consumption, so a ferment racked repeatedly may stop while sugar remains — while a single racking of a healthy, well-nourished ferment barely alters its course. |
| Body | Lowers | Yeast solids and colloidal material contribute to the impression of weight in the mouth, and each racking takes some of that away with the lees. |
| Fermentation character | Lowers | Separating the liquid from the cell mass halts the slow release of autolytic compounds that would otherwise accumulate and read as yeasty or bready. |
| Oxidative character | Raises | Each open transfer dissolves a little oxygen, which reacts with phenolics and with ethanol pathways to give a small acetaldehyde and browning contribution that accumulates over successive rackings. |
The chemistry and the organisms
What is actually being changed, and by what. Each entry says what that compound or organism does in cider generally; this page is one place it does it.
Compounds involved
Hydrogen sulphide
The rotten-egg gas a nitrogen-starved yeast produces, detectable at concentrations too small to measure easily, and removable only if it is caught before it becomes something worse.
Mercaptans
What hydrogen sulphide becomes if it is left alone: onion, garlic and rubber notes that are far harder to remove than the gas they came from.
Dissolved oxygen
Essential to a healthy yeast population at the start of fermentation and the principal enemy of a cider from the moment fermentation ends.
Yeast-assimilable nitrogen
The nitrogen a yeast can actually use, which apple juice is chronically short of — the shortage behind both stuck fermentations and rotten-egg aromas, and the shortage keeving deliberately makes worse.
Amino acids
The largest usable nitrogen fraction in apple juice, and the raw material from which yeast builds both its own protein and most of the aroma compounds a cider carries.
Acetaldehyde
The compound sitting one step short of ethanol, which smells of bruised apple and sherry, binds most of the sulphite added to a cider, and is the chemical signature of oxidation.
Organisms involved
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
The yeast that finishes essentially every cider, whether it arrives in a sachet or from the fruit, the press and the vessel.
Film yeasts
A functional grouping rather than a taxon: the oxidative yeasts that form a skin on cider exposed to air and consume its alcohol and acid.
Acetobacter aceti
An acetic acid bacterium that oxidises ethanol to acetic acid wherever cider meets air, and the organism behind most volatile acidity in cider.
Lactobacillus collinoides
A lactic acid bacterium first described from cider, and the organism most closely associated with acrolein bitterness through its conversion of glycerol.
What it is done with
Pumps, and what a rough pump does to cider
A pump that shears, cavitates or draws air changes the cider it moves — stripping carbon dioxide, dissolving oxygen and breaking up lees — so the choice between centrifugal and positive-displacement types is a quality decision, not only an engineering one.
Siphons, racking canes, hoses and food-grade tubing
A siphon moves cider under gravity with no moving parts and no shear, which is why it remains the small-scale racking method of choice; the tubing it runs through must be food-grade, and it is the hardest thing in the cider house to clean.
Inert gas: carbon dioxide, nitrogen and argon
Gas is used to push air out of tanks, bottles, kegs and lines, and the three common gases are not interchangeable: carbon dioxide dissolves readily and will carbonate a cider, nitrogen barely dissolves at all, and argon is heavy enough to lie on a surface.
What can go wrong
Faults that begin at this step, or that this step makes more likely. Each one is set out with its causes and whether it can be put right.
Hydrogen sulphide
A rotten-egg or drain smell from hydrogen sulphide produced by stressed yeast, usually the first visible consequence of a nitrogen-short juice.
Reduction
A closed, stale, slightly sulphurous character in cider held under strongly oxygen-free conditions, sometimes clearing with air and sometimes not.
Stuck fermentation
A fermentation that has stopped before the sugar is gone and will not restart, leaving a sweet, low-alcohol cider that is vulnerable to everything.
Oxidation
The cumulative effect of oxygen on finished cider: fruit aroma flattens, colour deepens towards amber, and a bruised-apple or sherry-like character replaces the fresh one.
Thin body
A cider with no weight or texture in the mouth, most often from over-watered pomace, low-gravity juice or a blend with nothing to give it substance.
Acetification
The active conversion of a cider’s ethanol into acetic acid by acetic acid bacteria at an air interface — the process, running in the vessel, that produces volatile acidity.
Volatile acidity
The measurable fraction of acidity that can be steam-distilled off, dominated by acetic acid and read as vinegar sharpness in the nose and a hard, hot finish.
Acetaldehyde excess
A bruised-apple, green-nut or sherry aroma from acetaldehyde, produced by oxidation, by film yeast, or left behind by a ferment that was interrupted.
Film yeast growth
A pale, powdery or wrinkled film of aerobic yeast growing on the surface of a standing cider, consuming alcohol and acid and producing acetaldehyde.
Excess diacetyl
A butter, butterscotch or popcorn character from diacetyl, produced by lactic acid bacteria metabolising citric acid, and by yeast under stress.
Excessive sediment
More deposit in the bottle or vessel than the presentation intends, ranging from a normal conditioning yeast layer to a loose sludge that clouds every pour.
Flat and lifeless
A cider with nothing obviously wrong and nothing to say: aroma faded, acidity dulled, finish short — usually the cumulative result of over-processing or slow oxidation.
Lactic off-flavours
Sauerkraut, sour milk, silage or cheesy notes from lactic acid bacteria working on sugars and other substrates rather than on malic acid alone.
Mercaptan taint
Onion, garlic, burnt rubber and cooked-cabbage aromas from thiols and disulphides formed when hydrogen sulphide is left in cider long enough to react onwards.
Yeast haze
Cloudiness from yeast cells that have not settled out, usually because the strain flocculates poorly or the cider has not been left alone long enough.
Colour loss
A cider left noticeably paler than it should be, usually because fining, filtration or sulphite has removed the phenolic material that gave it colour.
Metallic taint
A metallic, inky or blood-like taste from dissolved iron, copper or zinc picked up from equipment, usually accompanied by accelerated oxidation.
Styles it produces
Categories in which this step is characteristic or required. Some name it in their definition; for others it is simply how they have always been made.
Keeved cider
Cider clarified before fermentation by a pectin gel that strips nutrients from the juice, producing a slow ferment that stops naturally with sugar still in solution.
Cidre doux
The sweet tier of the French cider scale, defined since 2025 by a density at or above 1.024 together with an acquired strength no greater than 3% vol, so that the sweetness is demonstrably unfermented juice sugar.
West Country farmhouse cider
Cider made on the farm from tannic bittersweet fruit, wild-fermented in wood and sold still and unfiltered, in a tradition whose variability is one of its defining features.
Still cider
Cider with no perceptible dissolved carbon dioxide, presented as a fermented fruit drink whose texture rests on body, acid and tannin alone.
Medium cider
Cider carrying enough residual or added sugar to be perceptible without dominating, the commonest sweetness level in British retail.
Apfelwein
The dry, sharp, still apple wine of Hesse, fermented out from culinary and local fruit and served in ridged glasses from a stoneware jug.
Dry cider
Cider fermented out or finished so that little fermentable sugar remains, leaving acid, tannin and alcohol to carry the palate.
Perry
The fermented drink of pears, a tradition parallel to cider rather than derived from it, in which unfermentable sorbitol leaves a sweetness the maker never chose.
Sidra natural
The still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, wild-fermented from local high-acid fruit and poured from a height to raise a momentary sparkle.
Euskal Sagardoa
Basque cider under its own protected designation, made from Basque-grown apples in the sagardotegi tradition of barrel service and dry, high-acid, still cider.
Most
The farmhouse fermented fruit drink of Austria and southern Germany, made from apples, pears or both, and belonging to a meadow-orchard landscape as much as to a recipe.
New England cider
A strong, dry, oxidative American cider historically raised in gravity with sugar, molasses or raisins and matured in wood, now defined chiefly as a competition category.
Poiré
French perry, made chiefly in southern Normandy and Maine from local perry pears, characteristically sweet, low in alcohol and firmly sparkling.
Still perry
Perry without carbonation, in which the fruit’s sorbitol sweetness and its texture carry a drink that has no bubble to lean on.
Traditional draught cider
Cider dispensed from cask, bag-in-box or gravity without added gas, in the form that British cider has historically been drunk in pubs and at the farm gate.
Wild-fermented cider
Cider fermented by the yeast population already present on the fruit and in the cellar, without an added cultured strain.
Barrel-aged cider
Cider matured in wood, where slow oxygen ingress, extraction from the staves and the barrel’s resident microflora all change the finished drink.
Cidre brut
The dry tier of the French cider scale, defined since 2025 by a density no greater than 1.016 with an acquired strength of at least 3.5% vol — correspondingly more of the juice’s sugar converted to alcohol.
Cidre demi-sec
The middle tier of the French cider scale, sitting between doux and brut on density and forming the commercial centre of ground for much French cider.
Mostviertel Birnenmost
Austrian pear Most from the Mostviertel, made from the region’s tannic standard-tree perry pears, in which sorbitol leaves a soft sweetness no fermentation removes.
Scrumpy
A colloquial West Country word for rough farm cider that has never had a fixed definition and now carries as much marketing weight as descriptive meaning.
Unfiltered cider
Cider packaged without filtration, retaining suspended yeast and fine solids and the body and aroma that come with them.
Viez
The cider of the Moselle and Saarland, dry and still in the local manner, drunk from a distinctive lidded pot and named from a word for the second pressing.
Welsh cider
Cider from Wales, rebuilt over recent decades from a nearly lost tradition, with protected names for traditional Welsh cider and perry and a fruit inventory shared with the English border counties.
Galician cider
Cider from Galicia and the north-western Iberian fringe, made in a smaller and less codified tradition than its Asturian and Basque neighbours, from a distinct local fruit population.
Suure Most
The Swiss farmhouse cider of the plateau, typically dry and still, drawn from meadow-orchard fruit and distinguished in local usage from the unfermented sweet juice of the same name.
More on racking
What makes racking worth a long entry is that it is two operations wearing one name. As clarification it is unremarkable — solids fall, liquid is drawn off, the cider is cleaner than it was. As fermentation management it is the principal lever a maker has who does not wish to add anything. Apple juice is often poor in assimilable nitrogen to begin with, and a large fraction of what nitrogen there is ends up inside yeast cells rather than in solution. Racking carries those cells out of the vessel. Do it once and the ferment slows a little; do it repeatedly, each time the cider has thrown a fresh deposit, and the yeast population is driven down faster than it can rebuild, until fermentation is measured in points of gravity per month. That is not an accident of tidiness. It is how a cider is brought to rest with sugar still in it.
The two deposits a maker deals with behave differently and should not be treated alike. Gross lees are what falls in the first days and weeks: coarse fruit debris, pectin and protein flocs, and the bulk of the yeast crop, forming a thick and quickly compacting layer. This is the material most likely to give trouble if it is left, because a deep bed of it goes anaerobic at the bottom and the cells within it autolyse under stress. Fine lees, the light powdery deposit that continues to settle from a cider already reasonably clear, are a slower and gentler matter, and a maker who wants texture from lees contact is talking about these rather than about the first sludge. The usual practice is to get off gross lees without undue delay and then to decide, deliberately, how long to sit on the fine deposit that follows.
The trade-off runs in both directions and neither end of it is safe. Left too long on a heavy deposit, a cider turns reductive: it smells first of struck match and boiled vegetable, then frankly of hydrogen sulphide, and if the sulphides are allowed to combine into mercaptans the problem stops being reversible by racking or aeration. Racked too hard and too early, the same cider is stripped of the yeast that would have finished the job and of much of the colloidal material that gave it weight, and the result is a ferment that stalls at a gravity nobody chose, in a liquid that tastes thin and has lost its buffer against spoilage while sugar is still available to the organisms that cause it. Every racking is also a small dose of oxygen. In a young, tannic, reductive cider that dose is often wanted; in a delicate, low-tannin cider approaching packaging it is a cost.
French practice makes the technique explicit. In a keeved cider the chapeau brun is formed and the bright juice drawn from beneath it, and thereafter the cider is racked again and again — soutirages successifs — precisely to keep it nitrogen-poor and slow, so that it can be bottled while still sweet and finish its carbonation in the bottle over months rather than weeks. That is a different intervention from keeving itself: keeving is the pectin-mediated defecation that strips nutrient out of the juice before fermentation properly begins, while successive racking is what maintains the starvation afterwards. Elsewhere the emphasis differs. West Country farmhouse practice traditionally racked from cask to cask when the cider had fallen quiet, as much to get it off the lees and into a full, sound vessel as to control sugar; Asturian sidra natural is generally racked to leave a dry, clean cider rather than a sweet one; and a modern producer working in stainless with a pitched yeast may rack once and let the rest be handled by filtration.
Related processes
Steps that sit alongside this one, replace it, or depend on it having been done.
Fermentation
Keeving
Forming a floating pectin gel that lifts nutrients and solids out of the juice, so that the ferment starves before it finishes and leaves natural sweetness behind.
Maturation
Lees ageing
Deliberately holding a cider or perry on its fine yeast deposit so that autolysing cells release material that changes texture and foam behaviour.
Maturation
Topping up
Refilling a maturing vessel as evaporation and racking losses lower the level, so that no significant surface of cider is ever left in contact with air.
Fermentation
Arrested fermentation
Deliberately halting a ferment while sugar remains, to obtain natural sweetness from the fruit rather than from an addition — and accepting the instability that follows.
Fermentation
Fermentation monitoring
Watching a running ferment through gravity, temperature, smell and surface behaviour, and reading the rate of change rather than any single figure.
Maturation
Tank maturation
Resting cider in stainless steel or a lined vessel, where the point of the container is that it contributes nothing and admits almost no oxygen.
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- How long does cider take to ferment — A warm ferment with cultured yeast can finish in one to two weeks; a cool wild ferment in a cellar may take three months or more. Slow is not the same as stuck — the test is whether gravity is still falling.
- How do you stop cider from fermenting — By removing the yeast, by chilling, by filtering it out, by pasteurising, or by a combination — and in practice a home maker cannot reliably stop a ferment mid-way with chemicals alone. Sorbate prevents yeast multiplying but will not stop an active ferment.
- What is keeving — Keeving is a technique for starving a ferment of nitrogen so that it stops before all the sugar is gone, leaving a naturally sweet cider. Pectin is made to gel and float as a brown cap, carrying nutrients and yeast out of the juice with it.
- Which yeast ferments cider — Saccharomyces cerevisiae finishes almost every cider fermentation, whether it was pitched or arrived from the press house. In a spontaneous ferment it is not the first organism present, only the one that survives the alcohol it makes.
- Why did my cider stop fermenting — The usual causes are a shortage of yeast-available nitrogen, a temperature that has dropped, too much sulphite at the start, or a yeast that has reached its alcohol limit. Check the gravity before assuming anything is wrong: many ciders simply finish.
- What are carbon dioxide, nitrogen and argon used for in cider making, and how dangerous are they — Air is what damages finished cider, and the cheapest way to remove air is to displace it with a gas that will not react with the cider. That is the whole purpose of inert gas in a cider house.
Where to go next
- How cider is made — The whole sequence, stage by stage, with the choices open at each one.
- Cider science — The chemistry and microbiology the methods on this page rest on.
- Troubleshooting — What goes wrong, how to recognise it, and whether it can be reversed.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
The Science of Cidermaking and associated technical writing
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-24
Written by a food chemist who worked at Long Ashton on apple phenolics. Unusual among specialist cider writing in that it is primary-research-adjacent: the author is describing work he did, and cites the literature. This is why it is registered at tier 1 for chemistry while a general cider book is not.
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC)
IFPC · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The French technical institute for cider production. The authority for the French cultivar classification families, for keeving as an industrial process, and for the pectin and nitrogen chemistry that keeving depends on.
Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.